Being a fan of the artist Keira Rathbone for her typewritter art work (http://www.keirarathbone.com/) I was excited to work on this project because the style reminded me of her work, sadly she was not invovled in the project. This piece was created for the online site http://www.thanklist.com/create it is an interactive piece whereby you choose whom you’d like to thank and your message to them along with a photo and it will create your very own personal video that you can then have sent to your choosen person.
I was involved in the compositing for this piece within a small team, we used a mixture of Nuke and After Effects. A version of the film can be seen below but the site is also still live so I highly recommend you give it a try if you have a friend you’d like to thank!

David Sayeed of Animated People arranged for me to interview with a company who deal mostly with computer game motion graphics. My previous work has not really been in that area so to sweeten the interview we decided I would mock up a Modern Warfare 3 style video clip. The clip was used to demonstrate my wide range of skills in After Effects and SynthEyes, I set out to demonstrate that I understood the look and feel for their work and to show my technical knowledge and work methods that allow for swift changes to be made and for shots to be re purposed quickly. The company was very pleased with the extra effort put in, they understood that the framework for the project had been put in place and that with more design time I could easily produce the work they would require.

The video below is a presentation of some of the steps involved in creating the above piece. Please view it in full screen mode for best results.

I also created a pdf document which outlines the important steps I took in creating this clip, you can view it here

This project was a little outside of Airsides comfort zone in that it was a full live action music video, wanting this piece to be great they brought on board a lot of talent who were very adapt in this area. Directing the piece was Tim Bricknell, and DOP was Carlos De Carvalho who has a long list of feature film work under his belt. I was brought in to head the compositing and 3d work, this involved a mixture of camera tracking, set building in 3d, and a fair amount of keying/rotoscoping. We had a small team of 4 working on the many shots, this video had a fairly quick turnaround and after seeing all the care and attention that had gone into the filming we did not want to compromise on the post production. I had trained an assistant to do some rotoscoping and guided her through her shots. Alasdair Brotherston was a pro and really helped us out in the last week to get the final long shots out.
During the start of the project it was just myself. I was going through each shot preparing the tracks and match moves so that they were ready for background artwork and keying. Once Everything had been setup I started to work on all the keying to a finished standard and adding extra touches to some of the shots, these included a snow storm and some squirting blood. The opening and closing shots were started by Simon Goodchild using Maya, I supplied the match moves and rough geometry in place for him to build the set around. After he finished we had to adjusted the closing shot to pull out from the crowd shot into the gallery as if it were the picture frame. This involved me setting up the camera move in Maya and then exporting it back into after Effects for me to build the crowd scene, this had some extra problems as the shot with the kiss was filmed with a pull out so it first had to be stabilized and then implement it as a 3d plane. The original picture frames were remodeled and a mixture of bump maps and displacement mapping was used to add the detail. I used high res photographs of the frames as the base for my textures, this really helped to add detail and form to the main picture frame that we move through.

Airside also commissioned a making of video for Flashman which can be viewed on Vimeo

This commercial was made at Uli Meyer Studios, my role was senior compositor. 3D generalist and lighting TD Mark Bailey took the animated shots and brought them alive in Maya.
I used After Effects and Nuke for compositing. After Effects was used to stabilize some of the footage with its warp stabilizer, and handled the pack shot animations easily. Nuke was used through out for all the CG compositing. The live action shots required some cleanup and rig removing along with tracking points needing to be painted out, I first used SynthEyes to do a camera track this was very useful for some of the tracker removals as I would convert 3d points into 2d ones and attach my paint strokes to it. This workflow allowed the plate to be cleaned very quickly. I also used the tracking data to create a new floor and some geometry of the toilet inside so I could project some dirt and muck onto the live action plate. Geometry was created in Maya, and all projections done inside of Nuke for convenience and flexibility. Most of the CG was graded with mattes or subtraction of passes on the beauty and re-addition of the same pass that we wanted to adjust, this workflow was preferable for Mark as he had the time to tune his materials and lighting of shots to produce a very good looking render. Our renders were all done in house using Smedge, during the first couple of days I spent the time setting up each machine to be consistent with the software we were using and to pull all our plugins from a network source rather than locally. I also created a customized Nuke interface for submitting jobs to Smedge and for our gizmos along with bench-marking and prioritising machines for particular jobs . During the job I render wrangled and made sure we had the resources to get the job out in a timely manner. The fun part obviously was working with Marks renders. I setup a system of taking his Mattes and filtering them into my own channels in Nuke, I knew a certain amount of them would be standard and could be reused through out other Nuke scripts. This worked well in that most of my scripts were grade nodes using a channel for the matte. It kept the script tidy and compact, I would also leave notes in the nodes to make it clearer still what was going on. We added quite a lot of atmosphere to the shots with glows, trying to boost a wet look on the germs, and in camera effects like motion blur and depth of field. Mark worked very hard to make the Motion vector pass work exactly as it should and I have no doubt if it was the newer version of Maya that we were using it would have been easier but due to the germ rigs and associated scripts/ materials we were forced to use Maya 2009.

Work requiredI worked on this Advert with Charles Beglan who was involved in creating the 3d sets. We knew we would need a 3d track of the live action, therefore during the filming we were on set to supervise the vfx preparation. This involved taking measurements and layouts of important parts of the set, recording camera and lens data, and making sure we had trackers in view and enough parallax to assist the 3d tracking.
I prepared the footage, and did the matchmove using syntheyes 2011. For these I supplied Charles a 3d camera, and stand in objects of the sofa and foot stool in a Maya scene. With regards to rotoscoping I had two assistants that I was able to delegate work to. I used the matchmove to assist with the rotoscoping by importing the data into After Effects and placing solids in 3d space near the areas I needed to cut out. Most of the rotoscoping was broken down and roughly keyed before being handed out to the assistants.
I worked the treatment of the man sat down to match the clients vision. This was all comped together to produce the final piece. The post production company Nice Biscuits were involved in making the different versions and created the Laptop content.

Work requiredKate Sullivan designed, directed and animated a sketch to accompany Nick Newman and Ian Hislop’s Radio Four series “The News at Bedtime”. You can watch the full version here http://tinyurl.com/newsatbedtime. The sketches are produced by Simon Nicholls. They star Jack Dee, Peter Capaldi and Vicki Pepperdine.Martin Davey painted the backgrounds and I did the compositing and some 3d work using Maya.The 3d that was involved was mostly projection mapping. I would project Martins drawn artwork onto 3d geometry. This was used to good effect in the opening scene into the news room.

Here is a compilation of the Domino’s Pizza adverts. I was involved in various parts of this production. The live action was shot with a motion controlled camera and gives a real crisp feel to the backgrounds. The backgrounds were tracked in 3d as we had trouble getting the motion control data into our 3d application. I built and animated the 3d box and made sure it tracked nicely to integrate into the scenes. During linetest stage with the animation we were preparing all the matte runs and roughly tracking the characters into the scenes. I shared the compositing with another compositor for the final touches after linetest stage. These were played during the popular series The Simpsons on Sky One.

Work required
During this production I was involved in all aspects from linetest to final post production. This advert I was also asked to create some 3d props. The pack that flies into the air (shots 4,5, and 7) and also the football that is catapulted into the trees and bounces around (shots 13, 14, and 16). There was rig removal notably on the shots where Quiky is pulling back the catapult. Shot 16 (ball bouncing around the tree) was also lit in post production to match earlier shots where you could see the sun shining through the trees. Quiky had his tones applied and graded accordingly and various cast shadows drawn in to integrate him into the scenes.

Work required
I was compositing on this job, it entailed treating alot of the 3d artwork. The first group of shots of the sea had entire new skies placed in to look more moody and with a stronger storm feeling. Alot of the 3d elements needed better integration into the shots with colour grading, we added quite a few camera effects in post different depth of field blurs on shots. Shot 4 (wave crashing into the boat) was some stock footage that we purchased, it was masked out positioned and distorted to create the feel we wanted. This had alot of treatment to it so that the whites of the wave looked fluffy white and so that it matched the 3d sea. There were various shadows painted onto the boat to help integrate the wave better. Shot 7 (the chocolate swirl) was created in lightwave (by a freelancer) but had a few issues the shape and twirl was working well but the middle had an awkward shape that needed to be fixed in post. Also the render was not looking as “wet” as this final version, it was graded substantially with various passes extracted from the original render to produce the final look.
The underwater scenes had alot of bubbles added and little plant life placed in. The red fish in various scene were modeled and setup for animation in Lightwave. These jobs normally have about 12 different versions for different countries and a cut down of 20seconds created. These are all played out to a digi-beta

Work requiredI worked on this advert during all stages of production. It concluded with a 2 day post production with the clients. At this stage it was minor tweaks and adjustments mostly to Quiky’s (the rabbit) tones and integration into the live action shots.In shot 6 (climbing the fridge) I created the props of the letters in Maya, these were lit, and animated to match the live action plate and Quiky’s animation. The live action required much resizing and repositioning as the client was not very happy with the way the camera moved in this scene. We had to reframe much tighter in the shot and force the camera to pull out whilst keeping the fridge top in the same position.Shot 11 (Quiky jumping from the hammock) required the pack to be clearer so we tracked in some new artwork.